Mid-Season Growing Season Update

Although the fifth and sixth installments have yet to post, we’re halfway through Growing Season, our public health and food justice comics journalism series for Truthout. While it’s our fourth season at Truthout, this is only the second year we’ve taken on a single focused subject for year-long exploration. Considering the popularity of Our Fashion Year (to be collected in a book called Threadbare in the spring), we thought it best to give you a little update on where the project stands.

Roots & Migrations, written by Anne Elizabeth Moore and drawn by Sarah Becan, focused on a Chicago-based artist named Fereshteh Toosi, whose food-based work references her own migration history and that reflected in the culture around her.

Sarah Becan also drew our second strip, Stinging Nettles, written by Anne Elizabeth Moore. In it we speak to Elizabeth King George in the Pacific Northwest, who leads Native American food explorations in person and online to pass on vital health, healing, and taste traditions.

Melissa Mendes then joined us for two strips that looked in-depth at Soul Fire Farm, an inspirational food justice program in upstate New York. Cultivation (above) and Cultivating Policy (below) presented the organization’s work around food and racial justice, but also opened up the discussion of food access to a query of the role of food policy.

Our upcoming strip by Sarah Becan and Anne Elizabeth Moore (posting Tuesday at Truthout!) talks to the dude who helps keep an eye on Food and Freedom, Baylen Linnekin. Can’t wait for it? Sorry! We promise it’ll be worth the wait.

Melissa Mendes and Anne Elizabeth Moore return in August with a strip that looks more closely at how particular food policy issues are contributing to a public health epidemic. It hits a little close to home for some of us, so we’re not even going to preview it for you. Just stock up on some hankies next week and we should all be good to go on the second Tuesday of the month, as usual.